faithofourfathers.net lists John Adams, Sam Adams, Charles Carroll, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Francis Hopkinson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, George Mason, Thomas McKean, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, Richard Stockton, George Washington, Noah Webster, and John Witherspoon as Bible-believing Christians. In order to prove this point it then posts, on separate pages, biographies of these men with quotations which bespeak their Christian beliefs.

While it would appear from these biographies and their own words on the subject that sixteen of these men could be described as Bible-believing Christians, I have my doubts about Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and for the following reasons.

Adams was a Unitarian, that is, someone who acknowledges only God the Father as Divine and who therefore denies the Divinity of Christ. John Adams’s biographer and the editor of his Works, his grandson Charles Francis Adams, wrote that “with the independent spirit which in early life had driven him from the ministry, [Adams rejected] the prominent doctrines of Calvinism, the trinity, the atonement and election. . . .” Moreover, church-state scholar Greg Hamilton says John Adams criticized the notion of Christ’s divinity as an “awful blasphemy.” So much for the claim that he accepted the Bible as the word of God. Adams would definitely not be regarded as a Christian by my friends at Congregationalist Park Street Church in Boston.

While Jefferson may have been a Christian according to his own dfefinition of the term, he believed that the Bible had become corruptted and cannot therefore be deemed to have been a Bible-believing Christian.

Washington to me, at this stage, is an enigma. There can be no doubt that he was a very Godly man. But a Bible-believing Christian? I’m yet to be convinced.

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 121 other followers

Adams in Patriotic Mode

“What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” John Adams